Social Media

Vine at One: A Creative Tool That’s Changing Lives

Happy birthday, Vine. You’re officially one year old. Unofficially, you’re a few months older. The app soft-launched in the summer of 2012. By October of that year, Twitter acquired the app and its tiny three-person development team.

On Jan. 24, 2013, Twitter released Vine into the wild. Now, 365 days, millions of Vine videos and at least 40 million users later, Vine is a social platform unto itself, albeit with very strong ties to parent Twitter.

It’s also unique in the social media space as a tool perceived, almost exclusively, as a creativity platform. Twitter’s first post about the Vine app explained, “Like tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (six seconds or less) inspires creativity."

Vine videos can be no longer than six seconds, but early adopters soon found you could fit a world of creativity, entertainment and information into that short space. The iPhone app’s (now on Android and Windows Phone, too) pioneering ability to capture and string together multiple snippets of video with a series of taps led almost immediately to Vine animation videos.

A Unique Niche in the App World

The brevity of Vine might remind some of Twitter, but in reality the tools are quite different. Vine serves as a successful complement to Twitter.

But while Vine video is good for news and storytelling, the Vine app offers a radically different feed than many other networks. Spending six seconds on each post seems like an eternity compared to scanning your average Twitter feed.

On the other hand, six seconds is insufficient for any kind of depth, which means Vine will never really compete with Facebook, a space awash in paragraphs-long personal stories and correspondence.

If you think Instagram (owned by Facebook) is a better analogy to Vine, you’d be wrong. At more than 150 million active users, Instagram’s network is many times larger. Despite the fact that both platforms are visual mediums, it’s clear they’re quite distinct.

On Instagram, it’s easy to take a photo, apply a filter and share what looks like art. Vine is strictly video, a much more difficult medium for making “art,” or something people might "like," revine or share on another platform. Instagram also offers video, but its 15 seconds per post may be even more daunting to average users.

Due to this barrier, video naturally leads to more consumption than creation.

“I think everyone begins as a ‘Viner,’ meaning that they create an account and expect to publish their own personal content, but after realizing it's not as easy as they thought to film something interesting, they give up and become a consumer,” Zach King, a.k.a. FinalCutKing, told me in an email.

Crafting a Career on Vine

King’s collection of mind-boggling Vine "magic" has helped him amass well over half a million followers. His six-seconds videos, which show him levitating objects and making others disappear, typically get thousands of "likes" and revines, as well as hundreds of comments. A YouTube compilation of his videos had millions of views before it was pulled by the network.

Like other creative Viners, King now creates Vine videos for a living. He works out of his garage and actually made more money through Vine than he made in the last six years posting YouTube videos. And he’s not the only one.

Back in May of 2013 Mashable interviewed early Vine innovator Khoa Phan. Phan’s construction paper animations immediately caught the eye of the Vine audience and Vine itself, which selected one of his early works as an editor’s pick. Today Khoa is making Vine videos for brands like Peanuts and Disney.

The ability to make money through a social media platform, especially in the first year of operation obviously sets Vine apart from other platforms. Imagine trying to make money on Twitter. Brands and big businesses can, via Twitter’s promoted tweet platforms, but good luck finding an average person making money on the social network, let alone when the platform first launched in 2006.

However, while comedians, artists and filmmakers like King still use Twitter to promote their work, they use Vine to get work. “Many of the top Viners are aspiring actors who have been able to jumpstart their career through their mass followings. I also think they are perfecting their timing and craft, especially for comedians,” wrote King.

Vine is a relatively risk-free environment for experimentation. Comedian Brittany Furlan (4.6 million followers) has been doing improv for a decade, but despite the freedom she might find on stage working without a script, Vine has its own unique benefits.

“Vine started as a place for me to perform freely without having to prove myself to anyone, and that's probably why I love it so much. It's a place where I can be creative without having to get permission from anyone to showcase my creativity,” she wrote in an email.

That creativity comes to the fore when these artists have to figure out how to squeeze an idea into six seconds. “You are forced to think outside of the box when you only have six seconds to tell a story,” said King.

Furlan joked, “It's actually really hard for me [to work within six seconds], because I think in longer form sketch. But basically what I will do is come up with a sketch longer than six seconds and just take out the punchline and make that the vine. The punch-vine.”

Rough Waters

Even as Vine grew into a creative powerhouse for countless artists seeking both an outlet and an audience, it hit a few bumps along the way. Just two days after launch, graphic porn started popping up on Vine. Developers acted quickly, and soon most adult posts featured a warning. If you want to see the naughty bits you have to click first.

Like Twitter, Vine is a place where strangers become friends, and sometimes fellow Viners meet up in real life. Most of the time, this is a good thing. However, when two Vine stars, actor Curtis Lepore (3.5 million followers) and aspiring singer Jessi Smiles (2.7 million) got together in real life, things didn’t end well. The two started dating, broke up, then Lepore was charged with rape. (While Lepore is currently free on bail, many of his Vine videos have disappeared from the service.)

Not the best PR surrounding Vine.

Too Rarified?

As Vine begins its second year, it may have to contend with the perception that it is just a tool for creative types, one that requires some kind of special skill — singing, acting, comedy, art or animation — to use.

Forty million people use Vine. That’s less than one-fourth of those on parent platform Twitter. How does Vine transform into a platform for everyone? Both the companies will need to address that question in year two.

Mashable
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